by Jeremy Hanke

In this issue of Microfilmmaker Magazine, I had the privilege of interviewing Thomas Ikimi, the director of the noir thriller, Limbo, which received our Editor's Choice award for November. He was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to share some thoughts, information, and advice.

JH: Thomas, as you could tell from my high-praise review of Limbo in our November Issue, I was quite impressed with it. It still blows me away that it was your first film and that you made the bulk of it while you were still in college.

TI: Yeah, thanks for the review. Such things mean a lot to us. I like what you're trying to do with your magazine and I was proud to have been a part of an issue.

JH: Thank you very much. We were proud to have you.

Now, you've done lots of interviews about the meaning of your film, so I don't want to duplicate a lot of those questions. Instead, I wanted to ask you some questions about some of the more technical aspects of creating the film for our readers. First off, how did you raise the $9,000 you made the film for? While this isn't much money to make a film on, it's still a pretty large chunk of cash for someone who was still in college.

TI: At first I had money saved up in my student account. It was about $3,000.00 or so. The Co-producer Chris Hale had about $2,500.00 to put in as well. So to begin with we had about $5,500.00. We were so naïve we thought that was a ton of cash and enough to make the movie on. Soon we realized it wasn't and I applied for, and got, a student credit card from Citibank. They had a promotion on campus and I was walking by the tables and just applied. It was my first ever credit card too. That put us into the $7,000 mark or so. My uncle gave me a donation as well as my mother and brothers and sisters. They were small amounts that added up. My Uncle did make a huge difference financially at key times when I had to make credit card payments and was broke.

JH: Your film has a very Hitchcock look to it, due to a combination of lighting and the FilmLook process. Let's start with lighting. To get the lighting you guys had to require a lot of creativity, considering how limited your budget was. What sort of lighting rigs did you guys use?

TI: The cinematographer Jon Miller and main gaffer Marcus Lehman, handled much of the lighting issues. I recall we had about three basic lights for cinematic standard three point lighting. We also had some more subtle lamps and shades with bounce boards etc to do the more nuanced stuff like the scenes with Lasloe the Great. Often we manipulated natural opportunities to create effects that worked. One happened in the bar where the combination of the low set foundation of the bar, the beaming lights through holes in the windows, and the smoke/fog machine effect, caused amazing streaks of light to stream into the bar and get visually amplified in the air by the smoke particles. The scene looked great as Adam walked in and those shafts of light hit his back and the bar counter.

JH: It sure did. That was one of the scenes that has impressed me each time I've rewatched your film. Now, how did you find out about the FilmLook process and decide to use them?

TI: I learned A LOT of what I knew about the technical side of movie making on the Internet. At that point I had been scouring the web for info on how to get my movie to look more like film. We'd done the lighting, we'd got the movie like story, we had actors, we had music. I soon discovered the 24 frame per second debate and effect on the web. Depth of field was out of the question with the camera and budget we were working with, and such an effect can't really be done in post anyway. However I found this company on the net that did 24fps for DV in REALTIME! Now, at that stage all there was to use was Cinelook and Magic Bullet. Those programs took ages to render and you had to just hope you got the look right shot to shot. With Filmlook, I sat in there and we did each and every shot to specification. It was amazing. I'd recommend them to anyone who doesn't have a 24p camera, a G5 or Magic Bullet 2. Now we have 24p cameras and HD 24p cameras like the DVX and HVX. You no longer need Filmlook to do what we did.

JH: There are a number of things that FilmLook brings up about how you should shoot a film if you want to use their process. A lot of filmmakers who've thought about using FilmLook have seen all the requirements and been a bit hesitant. Did you find these requirements restrictive when shooting the film?

TI: That wasn't an issue. You have to take movie making seriously and always act like it is a big budget film. Light like it's big time, plan like it's big time, shoot like it's big time. When you do this, everything else you do in post is a bonus. Never try to make your movie in post. That is a mistake and you deserve to fail if you do that. By the time you get to Filmlook, already have the skeleton of a good film in the bag. That way, the process will be able to achieve optimal maximization of your efforts.